devrandom Isaac's musings

Earlier this month we released OpenSolaris 2008.05 - a distribution of OpenSolaris that, so far, runs on any modern Intel/AMD/VIA processor.  This past weekend I decided to enter the fray into the
world of multiboot-ability with GRUB and see just how fun prowling the multiboot world can get! 

Thanks to lots of good documentation floating on the 'net  (that our friends at google make so easily accessible at the dyer time of need) - and most importantly thanks to our very own Partition Magician - good colleague Bob Netherton, for offering
some very inquisitive pointers at the very right time ....thus saving me from myself on more then one occasion. Bob - you r0ck!  Additionally this is one good GRUB reference I would recommend anyone beginning to tinker with GRUB.

So - what have I learned through it all?   Don't use parttype
in grub w/out having first jotted down what your disk geometry looks like - for starters.  Grub's parttype command allows you to specify the type of the partition.  Given the original PC's limitations of 4 primary partitions - and only one Solaris parition being available at any given time, it took some whimsical thinking to plow through some of the challenges that I wedged myself with right off the bat ...

What did I start off with ?

I started off with a fairly common entry-level environment - a PC that has 1 physical disk with the following partitions:

WinXP, Recovery Partition (provided by the PC vendor), Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 (that I had previously installed), and a FAT32 partition that I have data on, that I use for sharing across the Windows and SXDE partitions.  Without knowing any better, right off the bat, I managed to wedge my PC into thinking that the FAT32 partition is now a ext3 partition...or was it ext2... or was it fat.... and not having known to just be careful about plowing head-in, I almost ran for the recovery DVD's to re-start the entire process from scratch. 

Scratch is what I did, but not the PC but my own head. It hurt quite a bit, to have to realise that the only way forward was to succumb to the fact that with an innocentlly executed parttype command, a partition that was formerly known to be of one type, now could no longer be seen by anything.  OUCH. I guess I could've anticipated that - and in retrospect I am not surprised by my actions.  Thank G-D for Backups!

Now, what did I set out to achieve ?

I wanted to have a partition running with OpenSolaris 2008.05  in such a way that would still allow me to boot into SXDE and Windows XP.  There can only be one Solaris parition on a disk, and so the trickery that is involved is (although well documented by Bob here) still needs to take place. And with the version of GRUB that OpenSolaris comes with, relying on the reviously only-supplied-by-Fedora Core-version-of-Grub on this machine was not necessary.

I ended up deleting (in a planned fashion) a Recovery Partition and shrinking the Windows XP partition, to combine a 11GB worth of disk space to be made available to OpenSolaris. Now, it doesn't really need that much - only about 3GB or so, but I know I'll be installing various types of packages over time so thought may as well have the space available now.  I had formatted that newly created partition into ext3 (Linux) for the purposes of then relying on Grub to act as a switch between ext3 and Solaris.  Because of the limitation that there can only be one Solaris partition (not sure where that comes from - if anyone knows, please feel free to comment - I haven't googled this yet , the boot process entails making the Solaris partition that you want to boot into the active one, anytime you want to boot into it.

To install OpenSolaris 2008.05, what I had to do was to, prior to loading the OpenSolaris LiveCD into memory, jump out at the GRUB screen and instruct  GRUB to take the ext3 partition and convert it into a Solaris partition. At the same time, I had to instruct GRUB to convert the existing Solaris partition (that has my SXDE OS image loaded on it) into a ext3 partition.  The syntax for that (as is on my PC) looks like this:

grub> hd0, <HIT TAB>

<you get a screenfull of currently defined partitions, then:>

parttype (hd0,1) 0xbf

parttype (hd0,3) 0x83

root(hd0,1)

makeactive

What this does is it takes the 1st partition on the 0th disk (everyone starts their counting differently, Grub too - so don't grub it the wrong way else you're in for a treat!)

The geometry (hd0) command comes in handy, too.  My map looked like the following, prior to installing OpenSolaris:

hd0,0 - 0x7 (NTFS) 

hd0,1 - 0x83 (ext2fs)

hd0,3 - 0xbf (Solaris/ufs)

hd0,4 - 0xb (FAT)

After the installation of OpenSolaris into this multiboot environment, what I ended up with is a map that essentially looks like this:

hd0,0 - 0x7 NTFS

hd0,1 - 0x83 OpenSolaris

hd0,3 - 0x83 (zfs)

hd0,4 - 0xb (FAT)

title OpenSolaris 2008.05 Release - snv_86

	parttype (hd0,1) 0xbf

	parttype (hd0,3) 0x83

	root (hd0,1)

	makeactive

	chainloader +1

Right now the user experience looks something like this. By default the system comes up and gives me a choice whether to boot into OpenSolaris, Windows or Solaris Express Developer Edition.

If I opt to boot into the Solaris Express Developer Edition, the following command is executed behind the scenes and I am presented with the following screen - which is being read from the other Solaris partition that I have on my PC:

title Solaris Express Developer Edition 3 snv79

	parttype (hd0,1) 0x83

	parttype (hd0,3) 0xbf

	root (hd0,3)

	makeactive

	chainloader +1

Of course, bootability into Windows looks familiar and is not modified:

title Windows XP

	rootnoverify (hd0,0)

	chainloader +1

The unlucky partition that I managed to blow away was that very shareable FAT32
partition. Of course, not figuring out exactly what syntax must apply to FAT32 partitions, it took some thinking. Turns out, the help parttype syntax in Grub does not really reveal acceptable types - only the Hex range is the best I could find in the documentation - and that didn't help me.  At the end of it all, though, parttype (hd0,4) 0xb is what dresses up a partition in the FAT32 armor.  Betcha didn't know that. I didn't either... and still am somewhat not fully convinced I understand the differences between 0x6, 0x1b and 0xc - all of which appear as FAT paritions in GRUB.  But I'll leave that for another day as that lawn that I haven't touched for 2 weeks (having been out of the country on biz travel) is just beggin' for some mowin'...

Developer Days: Part X

During May 7th and 8th, in Sun's offices in NY and NJ, we had an excellent time giving updates on what Sun is doing in various engineering and field-facing organizations, fueling growth of cool technologies and solutions, especially, given our geographical location, in the financial services industry.

Below is a recap of the agenda and pertinent slides.
Please contact me if you require specifics on a customer-presented showcase highlighting "Flying Zones", and please indicate whether you would be interested in establishing a private, customer-2-customer dialogue with implementors of these technologies at CommerzBank in Frankfurt, Germany. 

Dialogues such as this are common in the industry and generally serve to benefit both private organisations.

Presentation slides can be downloaded as a bundle here

Agenda

09:00am	Welcome Back, Quick Sun Update – Ambreesh Khanna
09:05am	Solaris 10 5/08 Highlights – Isaac Rozenfeld
09:45am	SVGS (Flying Zones) – Herr Michael Bartruff, Commerzbank
10:45am	Amber Road & Greenplum (Open Storage) – Neal Weiss 
11:15pm	Solaris Network Virtualization Update  – Sunay Tripathi 
12:15pm	Lunch
1:00pm	Sun Thin Client/VDI – Isaac Rozenfeld, Amjad Khan 
1:30pm	MySQL – Philip Antoniades
2:15pm	Solaris Performance Assurance – Damien Farnham 
3:15pm	Solaris Performance Tuning – Amjad Khan 
4:00pm	HPC – Dave Teszler
4:30pm  Q&A/Raffle/Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed attending - look for more of these events to continue in the months ahead. Please let me or your local Sun contacts know what you think, and whether you would like to present about some of your interesting use-cases to others. As a bonus, if you are interested in taking a peek at what the local NY OpenSolaris User Group community is doing on a monthly basis, have a look here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/

Knowledge wealth is not a measure of material quantity; it is a relative measure of metadata's meaning, begging to be set free.

I often feel that people can be much more successful and productive if they share the information they know - openly.  So to do my part, I gladly welcomed an opportunity to participate in Sun's Tech Days 2008 WorldTour (details) and traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, this week, to present on some of Sun's very cool technologies (our Solaris operating environment and ZFS - two of which have recently been recognized as the Best Server OS and Best Filesystem (respectively) by InfoWorld in their annual technology review

While there, I had joined a dozen other Sun engineers, collegues and partners in a 2-day event focusing on OpenSolaris, Solaris and Sun's developer-centric technologies and tools (and we've got quite a community). The entire event took place at the Cobb Galleria Center; and the agenda was packed!

If you're a developer, an existing customer or a prospect, please do take the time to participate in these free events when they come to your town.  There were hundreds of attendees in Atlanta (I don't have the actual numbers yet) - and they all came to hear about cool Sun technologies: development tools, operating system features and services - and most improtantly, (I think), to interact and hear directly from Sun engineers involved in development of (and day-to-day activities with) these technologies. 

Speakers included (in random order) Jeet Kaul, Ian Murdock, Michael Ingrassia, Valerie Fenwick, Sowmini Varadhan, Scott Dickson, Don Deal and many others whose sessions I did not get a chance to attend. You can see the entire list of speakers and presentations from the OpenSolaris day.  I lead a session on OpenSolaris (A Definition) and on ZFS (with a focus on why developers should think of using it). Would love to hear your thoughts about these technologies and what creative uses you've come up with to entrust your business to them.

I also dived into examples of what I've dubbed Solaris Multiplicity -  a practice  of using various Solaris technologies jointly to come up with an economically malleable index representative of deriving increased levels of value for your enterprise,  rather then partially using subsets of these technologies and come up short of the full potential.

More on this soon...

Just returned from a 2-week long trip to DisneyWorld at Lake Buena Vista (about 30 min. ride from Orlando's International Airport) in Florida.  If you've been there, you'll probably agree with most of what I am about to write - else you'll (hopefully) find the below helpful in planning your trip.  Essentially, if you're family oriented and are traveling down there with kids who are at least 5+ years old, one of the things you need to do in terms of early preparation is acquire a bunch of Disney genuine pins that you'll hook your kids on (while there).  Go to ebay and search for "disney genuine pins" and buy a lot. Its cheaper this way (about $2 per pin vs. $7-$12/pin while on vacation).

Next, while there, you'll soon realize that everyone from the whole wide world is suddenly finding it necessary to travel there during the same time you're going.  That's a postulate.  So, before you go, call up the number at Disney dining services and make a few reservations at some of the restaurants they've got.  While I was there with my family, we were able to dine at Magic Kingdom's Castle as well as Norway's Akershus (in Epcot).  Both were great places, with plenty of opportunities for character photos for the young ones....  By the way, do you know what Epcot stands for?  No, its not "Every person comes out tired" nor is it "Every paycheck comes on Thursday".  One of the gents who worked there enlightened me that it actually stands for "Experimental prototype city of tomorrow".  Well,  I am glad its experimental.  There are quite a few interesting architectural decisions that had been made that result in very very crowded pathways (during the holidays) with absolutely no redundancy ...and  because the Fastpass program is so popular, the one facility they haven't adopted to be Fastpass-ready are ...restrooms

What I liked about Epcot is the fact that Disney architects have representations of 11 countries (Mexico, Japan, Norway, China, Italy, US, Germany, UK, France, Canada, Morocco) comprising about 60% of the park (my estimate) with the remaining 40% being dedicated to various attractions - and the whole theme of Epcot is about our planet, the world, unity, energy sources, etc.  The Bakery in France is absolutely amazing.  Must have the strawberry tart and the cake of the day.  Follow that up with a visit to their souvenir shop and walk away with a number of French gifts.  Make your way into Italy and Japan and savor some of the local specialties.  See the acrobats perform in China and visit Germany for a playful OktoBeerfest   If you're going onto the Maelstorm ride in Norway, remember to watch the 5-minute film about the country, following the ride.

The Animal Kingdom hasn't changed much since we visited it last in 2005, except that there's a new ride (Everest) and a seemingly much more developed Asia section.  Didn't ride on Everest, so can't comment on it, but the restaurant Yak & Yeti (Hi Alessandra!) (right by the Flying  Wonders [a bird show]) is a must!   Make a reservation if you can - lunch at about 3pm works well if you started your day late.  Earlier on, as you walked into the park, you (hopefully) caught the Pocahontas show (on the left side of the park) and then immediately thereafter, you've probably spent 1 hour in total waiting for autographs with each of the 4 characters that are there pretty much throughout sunlight.  The cool thing about the Animal Kingdom is that it closes early (I think that's because of the heavy presence of animals and preserving their peace) and so you may still have plenty of time after 8pm to hop a ride down to Disney downtown.

While there, you must visit the Magic Masters. You must eat at the Wolfgang Puck's and have a tomato soup and sandwich at Earl of Sandwich.  You must visit the Disney Pin Traders area - and you have to wonder into the World of Disney shop.  If you're into Cirque, they're there -  at Downtown Disney. And if you're there on multiple evenings, try to visit the Fulton's Crab House (by parking area 1).

Other then that, the Magic Kingdom is a wonderful place for all ages. Lots of popcorn and sun sure make for a fun-filled vacation.  The Noodle Station serves up some very very tasty varieties so if you're into noodles, you'll likely enjoy a bowl of veggie/tofu/chicken.

As for beating the crowds, make sure you're there bright and early, do your homework the night before (visit the Guest Services counter at each park to obtain the schedule of events/shows for any of the 4 theme parks at DisneyWorld).  There  is no substitute for having the ParkHopper option, but my personal experience dictates that at $45/person, its an option only worth having at Disneyland, California and not Disneyworld, Florida, because in Disneyland, the 2 parks are close to each other - you can hop between them easily. At Disneyworld, you'll likely spend a day at one park (there's lots to do) and you'll likely not going to want to go to another park in the middle of the day.  Not unless you're in that park for the 3rd day during your stay - this has been my experience.

Bring a stroller, if you can.   With the time spent waiting in lines to rent a stroller, and having to return it and then having the kid being tired by the day's end, plus at $8 to rent a stroller ($16 for a double) and being there for 7 days, the math quickly adds up! 

 
...and repeat after me: "Its a Small World After All"....

 
Cheers and Happy New Year to all!

What is Sun doing in the High Performance Computing space ?  The answer to that question is likely to surprise you, especially if you have not followed Sun for the last few quarters.  Generally, what contributes to the answer are components that help enable technology solutions that meet specific requirements of latency-sensitive workloads. But the answer does not stop there.  A solution typically spans various parts of the architecture stack, from the hardware, through the operating system software and up into the end-user's application. Availability of the operating system's libraries and operating system's intrinsic observability, virtualization and high availability capabilities become essential elements   of an overall solution that business depends on.  To that end, I had an   opportunity to share in the fun of hosting a Sun solutions exhibit at this   past September's High Performance on Wall Street  event, at the   Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.  There were lots of interesting   keynotes from customers who are actually facing these challenges and   are working through them. Additionally, there were a number of   interesting exhibitors sharing the exhibit halls with us.  I, of course, talked  about successes seen by our customers through the use of Solaris  DTrace facility, our rich x64 AMD/Intel product line and various  developer tools and solutions that have HPC requirements and  capabilities inherent in them and examples of our joint work with Cisco,   Intel and Reuters that has allowed for ....very interesting low-latency   performance solutions for financial services customers.  There's a global group of customer-facing archtiects and performance engineers (lead by   Ambreesh Khanna) that is actually leading the charge on a number of   solutions geared toward aiding our global financial customer base. Overall, you can  read more about what Sun is doing in the High Performance Computing space by following this link:  http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/index.jsp

(Photograph courtesy of Dov Friedmann. More photographs from the event are available here)

New York City on the 1st day of November ...aaah, yet another data point reminding us that the flavor of autumn has once again made its appearance.  I love autumn!  As if last night's stroll with the kids trick-or-treating wasn't enough, this morning's cold, crisp air (augmented with randomly dancing yellowish leaves occasionally painted with traces of red and orange) created such a wonderful & unique experience. (Had it rained, the experience would not only have been  unique but a wet one, too!)

The constant hustle and bustle of the city was no different today.  Brooklyn's Marriott Hotel (by the the historic Brooklyn Bridge) hosted this year's New York City Government Technology Forum.  Sun was one of the sponsors. There was an exhibit with many interesting (and well-known) vendors catering to the City, State and Federal Government industries.  I had an honor of speaking at this event; topic - Server Virtualization.

Together with Christopher Theon (Practice Manager, GTSI) and Marcos Merced (an MIS Director from DoITT) we had just over an hour to define and discuss server virtualization.  We divided the time frame into, roughly, three 15 to 20-minute timeslots (to allow opportunity for Q&A). Since my topic dealt with introducing virtualization and discussing hardware and software components, I spoke first. My goal was to remain vendor-neutral and provide an objective overview of server virtualization technologies. (I hope I've succeeded in meeting that goal).  Here are my presentation slides.   Chris extended the discussion by picking up on the business drivers that I had introduced.  He took the discussion further into cost analysis and other business-centric elements that are critical in evaluating the approach and success of a virtualization project.  Marcos talked about a case study of deploying VMware solutions over the last 3 years, and how it has helped his organization  improve overall agility and importantly - reduce costs.  While each of our topics could well take an hour, each on their own, I would love to hear what you thought (if you were among those attending).   

And if you weren't in the audience, I would still love to hear about creative ways that you've used to employ virtualization technologies to address business drivers (even if you did not [or do not] use an ounce of Sun's technology to accomplish that)...

Have you caught the OpenSolaris wave yet?  Back in the Summer, Brian Gupta and I kicked off a New York OpenSolaris User Group  for the purposes of educating the community and soliciting input from the community on how people use OpenSolaris and Solaris technologies. This is meant as a two-way street. Check out some of our previous meeting pages, as well as an upcoming meeting on November 15th.   Why is all of this important? If you are not yet aware of how Solaris development works, you may be pleasantly surprised that all of the development of new technologies goes into the next release of Solaris that is currently being developed in the open - dubbed Nevada, i.e. SunOS 5.11. You can actually get a taste for some of the technologies that have been opensourced as part of that process and experience them before SunOS 5.11 is released commercially.  If you look back at the calendar, eventhough Solaris 10 came out commercially in January of 2005, our engineers had already been running builds of it back in 2002.  That means enhancements to (or new) features like CIFS, ZFS, FMA, enhancements to crypto technologies, DTrace, Intel-specific enhancements ....are all available today, via opensolaris distributions, such as SXDE 9/07 release.  Check out the free SXDE release...

Last week I had an opportunity to meet with and present to one of our interesting financial customers (who will remain nameless for non-disclosure reasons). Subject of the meetings had been Solaris, virtualization, container management, processor roadmap discussions (and so forth).

 During the meeting we discussed how Solaris Zones are being used with a real business strategy in mind. Although Zones are a nice feature of Solaris, when taken at face value it doesn't really stand out until you do something creative with it, something so customer-specific (yet amazing!) that vendors typically do not offer out of the box.   What I am referring to here is facility that's been developed [in-house] that focuses on empowering lines of business units to self-sufficiently create Solaris Zone environments for themselves, via  a webtool. 

Not only that, but what had been demo'ed to me actually appeared as a working, really thought through, solution that, at its core, has business drivers in mind.  One of the key deliverables of this webtool is that it leverages inexpensive technology to enable the consumer to request an instantiation of a pre-defined zone profile (and there are a few), with storage, processing power, memory, IP allocation, etc. - self-sufficiently via the intranet web! On top of that, a Zone gets provisioned and becomes available for use in less then a minute!  

How does this exponentiate the coolness factor ?  It allows the customer to expedite the time to requisite hardware/processing space in the datacenter and shrink that from what it would otherwise be (and you know how long that may take) ...down to 20 seconds!

I was amazed.   The idea is really straight forward - there are a number of servers, SAN storage and IP address pools that are allocated for LOB's as a co-operative. Leveraging Solaris Zones (often referred to as Containers), the tool offers up an opportunity for end-users to pick a pre-defined Zone profile (there's a set, reflecting typical types of applications that are of utmost interest, held in a cpio archive).  An end-user access the internal website, chooses an available profile, fills out some basic information about a zone and submits a form. Within seconds, the work is done. The user sees progress of zone creation, gets notified by email when the process is complete. Because it is a shared environment, a zone has an expiration date (think: leasing) that can be adjusted (if needed).

[BRILLIANT, MIKE!]
 

8/12/07 - Update and a response to comments -

I understand the tools were pretty much  PHP and CGI-like scripts on the backend to call things like zonecfg(1M) and zoneadm(1M).  I do not have specifics as to the effort, however I inquired as to the timeframe for getting this sort of thing done and I understand it was done in a matter of a few months, by one key person working on this often on their own time - as a pet project.


Since this is based on the Solaris 10 11/06 release (which backported* a ton of Zone/ZFS integration code from OpenSolaris/Nevada), the zone clone feature is leveraged, so is the ZFS filesystem, which is what zones get deployed to and how reservation and quotas are enforced. They also provide storage for data on ZFS so its easier to manage and delegate complete control of ZFS filesystems to the Zone administrator - voila!

*For those that may not be aware of this fact, a currently available commercial release of Solaris does get features from the next release currently in development. As such, Solaris 10 does get certain features from the next release of Solaris  being developed in the OpenSolaris community. The codename for the SunOS 5.11 kernel is Nevada and that is where new features appear first, prior to getting (if appropriate) backported/integrated into the Solaris 10 codebase. See http://www.opensolaris.org for more.

 

These past few weeks have been interestingly eventful.

In June Brian Gupta and I kicked off an OpenSolaris User Group for the New York area. 

In July we had Ian Murdock and Sara Dornsife visit us while in New York.
As a quick reference, Ian Murdock is a founder of Debian distribution and a former Chief Technology Officer at the Linux Standards Base, whilst Sara runs OpenSolaris Marketing.

Details and some initial responses from the July meeting have been interesting, to say the least. We were very pleased to have had a number of members of the New York Linux User Group and UNIGROUP communities with us. This is what communities are all about. Thank you to all who make events such as this educational and fun.

A day later we had an all-day Sun/Solaris marketing event in our New York office, followed by a pipe explosion a block away from our office. NOT fun!

Earlier that day, I had a 40 minute time slot to present to a room full of customers on the features and futures of Solaris. For obvious reasons I can not distribute content in writing that alludes to future-available features and timeframes, but I have sanitized it to the extent that, I think, allows me to confidently portray the types of things that we are expecting in a Solaris update really-soon-now. What's interesting is that a good number of features that will be showing up in Solaris have actually been out there in the OpenSolaris world for a while. This is how we develop Solaris and if you're not yet an OpenSolaris community member, what is stopping you?

You're welcome to take a peak at the slides if you missed it when I presented it in New York (and Somerset, NJ the next day).

Last week I had been in Mexico City, presenting at Sun's Immersion Week 2007 conference.  Speaking on 2 topics, twice each in one day, does pose its challenges.  As one example from this presentation, I recall catching myself uttering phrases  like "Unplanned Uptime" (in the context of Solaris features like SMF, FMA, Zones).  Of course, my intent was to elaborate on how Solaris 10 helps minimize unplanned downtime.... but jinxing myself with phrases like unplanned uptime was certainly a jaw-dropper, to say the least.  

Another, as shared over diner with Scott, Antonio, Mauricio, Jazmin and Enrique later in the day, was to maximize unplanned uptime of non-global (loco) zones.  But you'll haveta buy me a drink to get the full story.

Bah! A short stroll on the blogroll ...

I must've missed  this when it was announced just 2 weeks ago! 

This is really taking Project Blackbox much further. More importantly, its taking it OUTSIDE from the Datacenter and into the great white open.

Solaris 10, as well as OS minimization in general, still seems like a hot topic these days.  Following my Customer Engineering Conference '06 blog entry from San Francisco, I've uploaded  a Solaris 10 Adoption and Minimization presentation [pdf] that I gave there last October.

Would love to hear how you're doing in this space and if you need help, would love to come and talk with you and your organization about lessons learned in the field on this very interesting subject.

Ah, April 1st ...

Who would like to be teased? 

Ever wonder why so many blogs are about cats and dogs that people have and adore? Well, I don't have a dog, nor do I have a cat, but.... my sister has a Rottweiller so I guess that qualifies for a blog entry related to dogs.   And yes, he has been to my datacenter.  Sniffed quite a bit actually, all without causing any downtime.

    Last month I was invited to help kick-off a monthly set of OpenSolaris User Group meetings in Florida. We had started with Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa, and in the months ahead are planning to be adding Orlando. We had a number of participants and, as promised, I wanted to post the presentation that I had given. The topic was OpenSolaris and, as we'd say in Russian, "what would you eat it with", or more precisely: What it is, how it works and why it may be of interest to you - the community.

 The slides for Ft. Lauderdale's discussion are here whilst the presentation deck for Tampa is located here. The content was pretty much the same. Both are in .PDF.   You can use Evince or gpdf to view these (in OpenSolaris).

Big kudos to Forsythe, Inc. for helping sponsor this event, and in particular to John McLaughlin, who runs SystemNews e-newsletter.